BRAD: "I should also say that regardless of sales or reviews, our commitment to Elemental will not be affected."

If this is 100% true then I will be awed, surprised, grateful and positive about the future of our race.

Don't get me wrong: this would be normal.

But I just have to look at simple things like politics where politicians don't just do what's best, but they tend to do what gives them the most votes to see how horribly it has been going wrong, ever since I started following the news and being old enough to make sense of it. Let alone companies depending on other people's money to survive.

If you'll have proven to have kept your word in let's say 2 years you deserve to be heralded like a hero and praised for your strong stand by what is normal (or should be normal) and just. You deserve a statue and a place among the great people that affect change for the better in this world. Just hearing you say what I just quoted makes me look more positively at the future and makes me hope my ideal hopes for better times might come sooner rather then later!

Thank you for saying it, I'll keep watching to see if it becomes truth.

BRAD: "As some of you know, most of our company's revenue doesn't come from developing games. Even if the game didn't sell another copy, we would still continue our update schedule."

Of course, that helps a LOT, but it doesn't diminish your intention nor the candor that speaks from your post. I am very impressed by you and your crew!

BRAD: "7. To those reviewing the game: I would urge you to review the game prior to v1.1. I say this because v1.05 (the release day version) is the version of the game that was originally released and if that version of the game is considered flawed then my view is that Stardock should suffer the consequences for that."

Another example of you taking responsibility, stepping into your own power. Facing the future bravely in the eye with your feet solidly on the ground you placed them on, instead of hiding, manipulating, twisting,...

I wish I could give you 100 karma, your words deserve it. I thank you,

Espavo 

I never said this.

Sorry about that.  I must have made an errant cut somewhere when I was trying to clean up the text.

Well probably times (and expectations) were different back then.

People expected a lot from Elemental... and by a lot I don't mean high production values, like movies, extensive voice acting etc. The point was to get a relatively low budget game, made by lovers of the genre, with less shiny content and more focus on the things that matter. People took it for granted that those would be absolutely nailed. Instead we got a nice, promising framework were everything regarding balance, proper AI, consistent "spreadsheet behaviour", etc. has still to be worked in.

It's only ironic that the aspect I love the most, at the moment, is the graphics! Certainly not what I expected before release.

Some backlash was unavoidable: the effect is exaggerated by people being "caught off-guard".

BUT...we're still here. No real harm done so far, we have patience and I definitely appreciate honest, frank post like yours  Good words and reviews will come in time.

Dito. 

Here's my post in its entirety.   Here's a selected bit for those uninterested in the whole post:

"So, I don't think of SD as rookies in the big leagues [As the person I'm replying to suggested], but rather as pros who are merely smaller and more streamlined, but as puissant.  I think their game is sufficiently "...step[ped] up...", and had they a bit more time we'd have seen that at release.

The test for my argument is the state of Elemental in a few months -- and I'm betting we'll see a game that holds its own vs. the 'big boys'."

The big lesson from Nixon's Watergate is that it's not the 'crime' that sinks you, it's the cover-up.  Best to take one's lumps immediately so one can quickly move on to what's being done to fix things.  Each time someone waffles they just prolong the topic and delay moving things to the positive -- how the game will be improved, looking forward not backwards, etc. ie the 'vision thing'.  It's in a business's best interest to do this.  Boogie obviously understands this, and does a great job being SD's public face here.

Well, quality period.  The last few posts by Brad before launch all indicated that they were ahead of schedule which implies that things were as they wanted.  I took that to mean that the game would run well without slowdown on a high end pc (they was talking about this running well even on netbooks in some earlier dev journals), that there wouldn't be random crashes, etc.  Things like the dev journals raised my expectations of what we'd be getting on day one.  Anyway, I'm still very confident that it will get there, but I wish I'd have adopted the game a little later after the bigger issues have been resolved.  I'm really glad that they are hard at work making the game better and am looking forward to playing again when the next patch comes out.  Fingers crossed for another patch this week, but who knows. 

Not sure if this my original Stardock account, probably isn't (I think this one dates from when I used to do Content addons for GalCiv??). Golly gosh, at one point I think I was under the 100k mark on member no. though. (I post this without knowing / caring about my member number - it used to be important, in the very distant past, or at least a source of amusement when the old fogies came out to play)

$50 tag & various tie-ins with book publishers, retailers and so on and so forth means this isn't the Stardock that used to exist. Stardock is about as Indy as Valve is, these days, just less commercially successful. Stardock (and no, I don't make the absolute fallacy / cult of personality that seems to exist here nowadays equating Brad with the entire company, I think we've moved beyond that somewhat, the financial position is allowing a castle now?) dropped the ball on this one. Not only dropped the ball, but committed three errors that shouldn't happen in a modern business:

1) Given a choice of retail space, weren't prepared to wait until an obvious market leader went gold, and attempted a rush release to "beat the release". If anyone in Stardock seriously thought they were competing with Civ V in terms of advertising spend, coder time, retail exposure or simple pure naked $ to throw at the project [2k games spent a fortune on the copyright license alone, fyi] then you're seriously deluded.

At this point, fire the person who made that call. (see point #3)

2) PR. Stardock has amassed some seriously good PR "kudos" in the last eight years. The very fact that reviewers are saying "Wait off for 6 months" instead of burying you, your product and any future product you might release is a sign of this.This forum, and the code (both 1.0 and 1.6) and the general media exposure and this very post I'm replying to proves it. No doubt. No whining that you like it. No forum "fanbois". Critical mass has spoken. You have been judged, weighed, measured and found wanting.

Stardock just burnt eight years of good PR. I hope that sabbatical is spent clawing some of it back.

3) For an "indy" developer, you ignored your strongest asset: die-hard fans. Beta-testing reports / points / posts all suggest that people were telling you the issues that existed, and you ignored them. You can do this if you're releasing a product that is guaranteed to ship a million units in its first month [Starcraft II]. Stardock cannot.

A point, and a stupidly obvious one, is your player-base opening up your own XML and pointing out the tragic errors you missed. This, I find the worst case in point: if you're releasing a product where people can look into your XML / Python, and they're fixing the errors for you then you need to just own up to releasing bad code. For reference - this point relates to "magical shards not effecting mage spells in tactical combat, but working in auto-resolved combat". Bad code there. Just scrolling through the XML, there are more, and some really amazingly crass ones. But you're not paying me to beta test your game for you, so I suggest you get cracking on it.

Point #8 of the OP's post should have said: "We're aware that some of the code we released is simply broken and as such, we cannot view the released code as our final product. We broke our own Bill of Rights, and for that, we're sorry".

Hmm. Yes, that bears repeating. Your code is broken. I can see it, your player base can see it (and is indeed fixing it for you), and if reviewers were up to old standards, they'd mention it as well. But we're no longer in Indy land, so they don't.

I think hubris was mentioned? Yes.. the person who posted knows what it means, as do I, and as do the people in the industry watching this debacle and feeling pity for Stardock. Not glee, no gloating... pity. But, given points #1-3, it is entirely self-inflicted. Given the problems the entire industry is facing, I think Stardock could have done itself a lot of favours here by simply not trying to play 'big business'; this is stated with full knowledge of which names went under this year, and which names just went flat out bust. (The Origin problem rears its head again, and again, and again... and Elemental isn't even a MoM beater, let alone industry leader. I'll say it again - whoever dared mention Civ V in the same breath as Elemental needs a serious reality check. Serious. Budget wise, the difference is in the $ millions. Reality is a bitch, but it is unavoidable).

Given the political nature of the cult of personality here, I think a quotation is in order: Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason. Ayn Rand (horrible & deluded individual that she was). The more intelligent readers will grasp the irony I'm getting at here.

p.s. Member # 694k.. definitely not my original account, oh well, that's what you get for recovering a password from a foggily remembered email account years out of date. And I hope the viewable edits will show I thought long and hard about this post - 'kudos' for the I.M.Banks reference and nod was worth it.

Like your XML?

*ba-bom-tish*

No, seriously, I wouldn't be posting wisecracks at the moment if I was working for Stardock. In a thread where the CEO posts his everlasting and humble apology to the world. Guessing you aren't in the PR department.

*Wonders about # returns refunded in the last week*

It turns out that there's some real people working at Stardock, they allow them to post on the forums, and they have a sense of humor?

Seriously dude, WTF? He posted a funny reply to your comment. What's the problem? Do you REALLY expect someone to come in here and give you a serious answer to a question like that?

Stuff like this is the reason why so many companies let nobody other then PR interact with the public.

I thought it was funny, along with many of the above.  It was in good taste. It's sad that some people have no sense of humor and must try to take us down to their level.

*wanders off muttering something about misery and company*